This blog posting represents the views of the author, David Fosberry. Those opinions may change over time. They do not constitute an expert legal or financial opinion.

If you have comments on this blog posting, please email me .

The Opinion Blog is organised by threads, so each post is identified by a thread number ("Major" index) and a post number ("Minor" index). If you want to view the index of blogs, click here to download it as an Excel spreadsheet.

Click here to see the whole Opinion Blog.

To view, save, share or refer to a particular blog post, use the link in that post (below/right, where it says "Show only this post").

Colossal cyber-attack!

Posted on 4th July 2021

Show only this post
Show all posts in this thread (Cybersecurity).

This news report on the BBC describes a huge cyber-attack, with about 200 US companies effected so far, and the number apparently still growing.

The attack seems to be working in a similar way to the SolarWinds attack on US government agencies in 2020, whereby a software supplier (Kaseya, in the latest attack) was breached and their software compromised; the compromised software was then distributed to their customers through the standard software update process.

The latest story, also on the BBC, reports that the Swedish Coop supermarket chain has had to close hundreds of their stores, because they were unable to process customers' payments. This is a huge problem in Sweden, where almost all shop payments are electronic, and many people do not carry enough cash to pay for their groceries.

The worrying thing is that the Swedish Coop is not even a direct customer of Kaseya, but a customer of one of Kaseya's customers. This suggests that the impact could potentially grow even larger.